Sunday, 14 January 2018

Concise, succinct and targeted material specially produced for the broadcast, refreshment and entertainment industries. Melody, rhythm and metre. Night circuits for the solar future.. Applied Music Vol.2 is the second in an occasional series of library-style albums from Café Kaput. Applied Music albums are organised into thematic selections and feature tracks chosen for their immediacy, simplicity of arrangement and distilled sense of mood.

Wednesday, 13 September 2017

My new album with Jim Jupp of Belbury Poly (and John Foxx guesting on two songs) will be out on Ghost Box on November 3rd. We had a lot of fun with this record. As is the case with everyone I collaborate with, there are certain qualities, certain textures that only Jim could create; if you combine that with whatever it is that I do, you hopefully end up with something quite unique.

I think that’s about it, for my releases this year. There may possibly be a solo digital album on Cafe Kaput in December, if everything falls into place - if not, it’ll be a January 2018 thing. There will be another record in 2018, but I can’t talk about that yet.

For the time being, I’m just making a lot of music for the hell of it, none of it being worked towards any particular release - literally for the sake of creating and enjoying the process. Business as usual. We’ll see what happens.

Tuesday, 4 July 2017

Agri Montana will be available from cafekaput.bandcamp.com on Friday. Below are the sleeve notes, to give some background to the album - above, Ian Hodgson's front cover artwork. The album also contains individual track art, with each new track incorporating art from the previous, to provide a sense of continuity.

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This album began as a fleeting idea that suggested itself, without much conscious thought. In July 2015, I spent a few weeks in a remote part of North Wales, with a couple of instruments and some recording equipment; not forcing any preconceived ideas, but rather observing what would happen (if anything) if I just let it.

Somehow, I made a connection between the Snowdonia landscape and that of the Austrian and Italian Alps. As soon as this connection was made, the ideas flourished. Flora and fauna, climate, air quality, farming methods and traditions, buildings and structures all played their parts and influenced the sounds and textures created.

I discovered a tradition in alpine farming; one that involved farmers making the ascent with their cattle, from the foothills to high altitude pasture, on a particular day in spring; beginning work for the season, with the cattle in situ throughout. Conversely, the descent being made on a predetermined day in autumn; again, with the farmers leading their cattle back to the low lands, to rest for the relatively inactive winter. This became the framework to which I built the album; the season of ascent and descent, with pieces describing the observations in between.

Whilst researching ideas for the graphic design of the album, Ian Hodgson discovered photographic techniques used by creators of alpine postcards, where by composites of images were made, with multi-layers of texture being superimposed on each other, sometimes to quite surreal effect; this fascinated me, as it seemed particularly analogous to the concept of multi-layering sounds to create specific textures.

The overall framework points to a sense of place, of geography, rather than time or any other reference. I wanted the music to exist as both ancient and contemporary, with its’ location being the primary identifier of the textures within.